On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

> But if we think deeper, one of the first questions to be answered in
> designing R is, do we want automatic memory management in terms of garbage
> collector or not?  It is known that invalid memory access and memory leaks

Definitely.

> we incur significant performance drop as compared to C.  (Not that the

What might be in order would be the ability to have objects outside the GC,
but that may turn out rather hairy. A good question. If it can be done
cleanly, yes. If not, you are out of luck.

> Member data access using hashing (as in Ruby) as compared to access using
> memory offset (as in C) I think is secondary, and therefore static typing

Offset, definitely. This is the major gain from going static, I think.

> member data; the language is called.... Java (which I think is still too

<!-- insert java-name-calling --!>

Failure of java to answer certain questions or satisfy certain needs does
not mean that it can not be done.

> (Hmm, I guess probably the right way is to start looking from the C++ or
> Objective C side, and then start reducing the language complexity from

No! Then you'll definitely end up with Java! The way to go is to ... I
don't know.

BTW: Matz, if you are reading this, could you tell us how ruby syntax and
implementation first came to be? Seems that you got it right. ;)

  -- Nikodemus